I was about halfway done with Anti-requiem: New Orleans Stories when I wrote my last blog post, but I was quite surprised just how quickly I finished it. I honestly didn't think I'd write another post today, but I thought I should while the stories are fresh in my mind.
This collection of stories are affecting me a lot right now, mostly because until half a year ago I'd never really left the South and most of the time I was in the South I was in Louisiana. For the most part we have a love-hate relationship with New Orleans where I'm from. We're as far from New Orleans as you can get and still be in the same state in all ways including geographically and socially and politically. When most people think of Louisiana the only thing that comes to mind is The Big Easy. I'm pretty sure that people who live in New York will understand. Not the city, but the state. It's an odd feeling being defined by something that's so far removed from your everyday experience, but I suppose it happens everywhere.
But despite all this, I'm sitting here reading these stories and longing for New Orleans and to hear people tell their stories like this. Up here, people talk differently and it's not just the accent. It's in how everything is expressed and told. No one wants to hear an exaggerated story if they can just get the facts and a punchline. They don't want to sit and listen to the play of language on a tongue and dive so deep into someone else's life in the strange intimacy that is a story from the South.
The first story didn't touch me at all. It was about a kid from Baltimore that came down to New Orleans and had a strange adventure with some drunken men. It was short. It was raw. It was to the point. It held my interest, but it was definitely written by a much different writer than the one at the end of this collection of stories. By the last piece he'd fallen into the rhythm of the city, and still managed to keep the rawness and directness of his first voice for the writing and the stories to transform into something almost magic. It spoke to me of home.
I can hear myself losing my accent every day. I don't mind. Nothing is more annoying than making an excellent point and having it lost on a group of people who ask you to quote lines from Gone With the Wind, a book that has always infuriated me. I don't know what it is about the Southern accent, but it's as if we have a sign over our heads saying, "MAKE FUN OF US!" I've started asking people if they would do that to one of our coworkers who is Indian. Or another from New Zealand. Or someone from Boston. I have to know why it's okay to repeat what I say and laugh in my face, but it's almost completely taboo for any other accent. Most people understand at this point that they are being terribly rude, but some people still think it's okay because they think I'm sweet. I give them "sweet" after that.
I know I'm on a bit of a tangent, but what I'm trying to say is I can see this writer falling into the city and the accent and the style through his work, while right now I am falling out. I don't feel like I'm falling into another culture though. I'm hiding behind a mask to keep people focused on me, and not some caricature they've built up around where I've come from. But I'm from Louisiana. We know masks.
It's a surreal experience.
I will definitely be reading The Sound of Building Coffins as the excerpts from it were wonderful. I've got to wait a bit until payday, but I have a ton more free books to get through. I'm sure I'll have a full list by payday.
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